A Two-Front Battle. On the Justification of Empirical Beliefs.

The question of what justifies empirical beliefs is traditionally answered either by reference to basic empirical beliefs that receive justification from something outside of the epistemic subject’s conceptual sphere or by reference to justification through coherence, in the sense that empirical beliefs are justified through their semantic relations to other beliefs. Typical of both kinds of answers is that they aim at a general notion of belief justification. This work argues that justification of empirical beliefs must be answered in a dualistic framework, where the key notions are coherence and reliability. The inherent dualism stems from the fact that the two justificatory strategies are essentially irreducible in terms of each other. The main goal is to show that this dualistic concept of justification is robust enough to make search for universal knowledge meaningful. However, the author also stresses the importance of cultural elements in belief justification, and points to how this leads to an epistemological defense of the norm of tolerance towards other belief systems and conceptual schemes.